Obama in Japan

The U.S. elections have been generating a lot of interest in Japan, especially in towns where they share the same name with a certain president-to-be. In the town of Obama (小浜 meaning 'small beach') in Fukuii prefecture, the locals are having a field day making anything and everything that bears references to the Illinois senator: from T-shirts to steamed cakes. The Democratic presidential nominee even wrote a letter of thanks and acknowledgment to the small town, which numbers 32,000 residents.

Read the article at this address:
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE4A21RV20081103

Oh and by the way... Congratulations Barack Obama.

Mama-chari

The Mama-Chari is probably the national symbol of road transportation. Used by almost every housewife in Japan for buying groceries and fetching the kids from Kindergarten, you will almost always see them plying the residential streets.

'Mama' means Mummy (duh) and 'Chari' means bicycle or wheels. I own one too, and it doesn't make my look sissy or anything. That is because everyone including students and salarymen ride them. I wouldn't be caught dead riding the same bike back in Singapore though.

These mums on wheels are truly a special breed. A common sight is the mother maneuvering through congested traffic with 2 toddlers in tow, and with bags of groceries balanced on her. It is actually illegal to have 2 children riding in the bicycle with you, but people don't give a hoot about it. The photo below is a Daddy on a 'mama-chari' with his 2 daughters waiting at a train crossing. It's very unusual to see a daddy do the chores like this. His wife must've been sick or something...

Train

The Japanese just love their trains. They love to buy electric toy train sets and make dioramas for it. Most cities also have entire museums dedicated to trains.

It's appalling that I've lived in Tokyo so long but have not blogged about the massive subway system. My bad, 悪いね. This is the map of it. If you think that's enormous, this system only covers the tokyo city centre. There are many other lines of several train operators sprawling out into the suburbs of different prefectures.

Unlike MRT trains that stop at every station along the line, Tokyo has several services:
1) Local: stops at every station
2) Express: stops at only a handful of stations
3) Semi-express: stops at about half of the stations (it's between Local & Express trains. Go figure.)
4) Limited express: It's a lot like the Express, except that it's a nicer train with plushier seats and pricier tickets.

The Express trains are good for commuters who live further in bed-town communities at the suburbs. These trains would cover 25km in 25 minutes. You select the service based on which station you're getting off at, and how fast you want to get there.

Other operators have names for their services like Rapid, or Rapid Express. You'd have to very carefully check which stations it stops at because these names can be rather misleading. The fast-sounding Rapid could actually be slower than the Semi-express.

These services run concurrently with each other, so a Local will remain at the platform of one station while the Express will pass it on via another platform. The most amazing thing is how there services run so seamlessly without colliding into each other, and without the use of a computer (which was the case in the 60s and 70s).


This is the front of a train. The right handlebar controls the gears while the left knob controls the speed. The train drivers take great pride in their work. I've seen many drivers, even while the train is on a nice cruising mode, stand earnestly in 'senangdiri' (drill: at ease position).

Japlish

Here's another example of Japlish, (or rather just bad English). I found this at a fairly respectable buffet restaurant in a shopping mall near my home. If you absolutely cannot make out what the sign says, it is 'Italian' and 'Sushi roll'.

Road Block

There is a road near my place that has been under construction ever since I moved into the neighborhood more than a year ago. It was supposed to be a road that connects a main arterial road to the train station, and would have made it a lot easier for many commuters. However, there is a house that simply refuses to budge (beige house with black roof tiles & red lanterns), and construction has been put on hold since.

This is quite a common phenomenon all over the country. Construction projects would be completed (with roads paved and lines drawn) up till the house in question. Sometimes while on the road, you could also see part of property sticking out and covering a portion across the width of the road.

So until the situation is resolved, the road blocks are here to stay. Nobody really knows why they refuse to move away. It's been said that the residents regard their homes are a family legacies or heirlooms, or it could be that they're just holding out for more money...

Adventures at McDonald's

Each visit to a fast-food chain or restaurant is a window of opportunity to practice your Japanese listening comprehension skills, while making a spectacle of yourself in the process. You not only have to figure out what they are saying in Japanese, but in English as well. There's actually tons of English words in the Japanese vocabulary (a bit of imports from French & German as well) but they sound anything but English. Because of the Japanese language system, every word must end with a vowel (with the exception of -n) so McDonald's would end up sounding like 'Makadonarudo', and a big mac is 'biggu maku'. All our silly impersonations of Japanese speakers as kids are not too far from the truth.

Ranking fetish

There's a late night show in Japan that ranks everything from movies to moisturizers. Other rankings for trivial items include low-calorie soft drinks to personal money saving devices (e.g. portable bank etc.) In true Japanese fashion, people would vote for their favourite items and it would be presented on this show.

Husbands & wives

Wives in Japan tend to be a marginalized lot. As housewives, they manage the entire household: cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and handling the family finances. The Japanese synonyms of 'wife' has fairly negative overtones too. the Kanji character for 家内 implies that the wife remains at home constantly. The term, 奥さん is possibly derived from the ancient (think samurai) practice where the wife walks 3 paces behind the husband. In short, the wife is thought by Japanese society to be completely subject to the husband. Generally speaking, wives are very much neglected and taken for granted by husbands.

Things are changing though. Baby boomer Salarymen (Japanese term for office workers) are retiring in the droves these couple of years, and wives are re-thinking their future with these husbands. Last April, a new law was effected by which a divorced wife is eligible to up to half of her ex-husband's pension. The divorce rate spiked 6.1% since, and is climbing.

See how a group of Salarymen husbands are trying to deal with this "problem".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/25/AR2007112501720.html

feet tucked in

One thing I've noticed about Japanese girls, which you may have too when you come here: They sit with their feet tucked in towards each other. Probably one out of every three women would be seated in the same manner as this lady in the picture. What's more, they walk with a certain gait, much like what you see in Japanese anime. It is possibly due to the fact that women in Japan sit on tatami mats (woven straw flooring) with their feet under their laps for too long. That's my hypotheses at least...

Everyone knows that the cellphones in Japan is space-ages ahead of those in Singapore. The Apple iphone seem to be making waves all over the world, but in Japan no one really bats an eyelid. With cellphones here, you can: make calls (duh), take pictures, surf the net, watch TV and pay train fares with it. Oh, did I mention you can track your position on GPS too? Another cool feature is that with your cellphone you can assess websites just by scanning barcodes published on advertisements (see photo).

Everyone is also asking if you could bring these cool phones back to Singapore. Unfortunately they work on an entirely different network so it is not possible to use them back at home. However, i hear that you may be able to 'unlock' some phones in dark deserted alleys of Akihabara (dun quote me on that). Anyway, cellphones here do not have English predictive text messaging, so sms-ing is a real pain...

Japanese puns

The Japanese just love to play with words. Puns are very common in Japanese media: advertising, TV shows, consumer products etc). The language basically consist of 50 or so sounds, hence quite often you may get a same sounding word with different meanings, and you decipher it through its context and voice intonations.

This is something that is being advertised on trains to promote courtesy among commuters, and I find it rather interesting. In the first ad, the red word is 'Kangaroo' which sounds it alot like 'kangaeru' meaning 'to consider' or 'to think'. Commuters are asked to be considerate and refrain from eating or applying make-up onboard (that is actually a prevalent phenomenon among Japanese girls. They are totally unrecognizable when they alight the train).

In the second ad, the maroon coloured word is 'Sai' for Rhinoceros, but the whole word 'chisai' means 'small' or 'little', encouraging commuters to turn down the volume on their headphones.

What does this do?

This is definitely something you wouldn't see in Singapore. At first glance, it may look like you put in 100 Yen and have a pair of shoes come out from the bottom. In actual fact, this is a contraption that polishes your work shoes. Machines like this are rare now though...